Every language and library has its warts and Python is no exception. By and large though, I'd say that Python's standard library is the best part of the language. Sure there are a lot of things like this out there, but for the most part, the standard library "just works" the way it's supposed to.
It's a debugging feature. It scratched a particular itch that a particular developer had at the time that they wrote it. If it weren't there at all, would this blog post still have been written?
It actually uses httplib1 under the hood which I've had weird problems with (even when using the httplib2 abstraction). Restkit has a better interface and really cool filters for such things as proxies.
Sometimes reinventing something as simple as the wheel is more robust than adapting someone elses equally half baked and unmaintained attempt at wheel reinvention from 2002.
A simple find-replace would be enough to switch it over to python's built-in logging module.